


fasten her tether unto me, that she may rise to sail free

by omegalomania



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roguelite, Canon-Typical Violence, Dehumanization, Explicit Language, Gen, Implied/Referenced Government Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Torture, Nonbinary Party Poison (Danger Days), Not RPF, One Shot, The Fabulous Killjoys (Danger Days) Are Not MCR
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27274945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omegalomania/pseuds/omegalomania
Summary: The Girl is fifteen years old when she decides she's going to break out of the expansive, underground Better Living facility where she's spent every day of her life.She makes it four floors up. Then she fails.Then she gets back up and tries again. And again. And again. And again.For as many times as it takes.
Comments: 26
Kudos: 43





	fasten her tether unto me, that she may rise to sail free

**Author's Note:**

> So this is wholly unconnected to anything in the current [fic universe](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1509731) I've been working on. I _am_ working on the next installment, but progress is proving difficult due to irl circumstances as well as how much additional work it's entailed thus far, and you will probably see what I mean by that last point once it's out. Additionally, I'm going to be spending **NaNoWriMo** working on an original concept for all of November, which means that progress for the next installment is going to slow down tremendously. But this one-shot here came together remarkably quickly, so I figured I'd go ahead and release it now. If for some reason you're waiting on the next installment in the "pray for disaster" universe, I'm very sorry for the wait, but here's hoping this will tide you over until I can resume proper work on it!
> 
> If anything, think of this work as...a few universes to the left of that one. Everyone is characterized similarly, but they're in a very different situation and yes this is purely because of the absolutely sinful amount of _Hades_ I've been playing and continue to play (seriously, I have over 150 hours in this game now and I haven't remotely gotten sick of it). Then one night this idea struck me in a bolt of, I'm assuming, divine inspiration because it refused to leave me alone despite me being drunk, exhausted, and yet somehow still awake at 4AM.
> 
> So here's this Fucking Thing, apropos of nothing. Think of it as Danger Days, reimagined as a dungeon crawler rougelite. Except it's not quite that. Except it is. Except it isn't. But it is. But no. But yes. <3
> 
> (This fic is best experienced with the _Hades_ soundtrack playing in the background. Or just [give it a listen anyway](https://youtu.be/3GRKJ87S5cI), as it quite severely slaps.)
> 
> And lastly, some **content warnings.** For the most part, this work is less heavy than others I've written in this universe. Despite this, you can expect plenty of canon-typical violence. A lot of this violence will involve the Girl, who is a minor at the time in which the bulk of this piece is set. She deals and receives violence in equal measure. She deals and receives a fair amount of fatal injury as well. Character deaths are a factor here, but due to the nature of this piece, you can be assured of their temporary nature.
> 
> This work also touches on the psychological effects of growing up in an abusive environment and extreme confinement. This involves references and discussions of government experimentation and government-sanctioned torture, and some depictions of the effects of that. I'll also be including a warning for eye trauma, which is mentioned and discussed several times. The aftermath of said eye trauma is seen and discussed, but there are no active depictions of it in this work. There are also a few references to implied utilitarian self-harm, but again, there are no actual depictions of it here.

**\--**

**When the frenzy quietens, and the mad mouth hushes,  
Aeneas, the Hero, begins:**

**\--**

The Girl is an asset, first and foremost.

It is for this reason that she grows up the way she does - on the fifty-fourth sub-level of the sprawling Better Living Industries containment structure, built to house everything from old criminals to particularly difficult consumers awaiting a more permanent form of bleaching. All fifty-four levels are carefully kept, immaculately maintained by a thriving crew of draculoids and exterminators and even the odd scarecrow who takes their shifts ensuring that the most dangerous of these guests never reach the surface.

The Girl is born on-site. She is an anomaly, she learns by perusing her own file before she is even ten years old. She was born to a draculoid, something which has never been noted to occur before, and she exhibits...peculiarities that make her worthy of study. Her only company consists of the dracs and medical personnel that attend to her. Her existence is comprised almost entirely of tests and questions and assessments. They gauge her physical fitness, her mental acuity, her emotional output. Her mind cannot be allowed to be corrupted and warped and destroyed beneath the aching pressures of bleaching and re-education tactics, not until they know, specifically, whether it is something neurological that is responsible for her anomalous tendencies. And so she has never been placed on the medicated regimens that are typical for most citizens of Battery City. 

_Battery City._ A metropolis sheathed in white, vast and sprawling beneath the Californian desert sky.

The Girl has never seen the sky, whether the genuine article or the weather-controlled veil that all Battery City denizens wake to every morning. It is natural, of course, that she would be curious about it. That in her continued education about the world, she would wonder if she could see some of it for herself.

They try the standard measures. Secure automated doors, vacuum-sealed, keeping her in one singular chamber with a number of wall-mounted security cameras to observe her movements. One by one, those camera feeds go dead. Then the doors spring open, unbidden, and the Girl wanders from her containment chamber and sets off in search of an elevator.

She is six years old at the time. If there is malicious intent behind her casual subversion of the complex Better Living security strictures, it does not show.

They are quick to learn that anything on an electrical grid cannot be trusted around her. They try to compensate with analog measures instead: deadbolts and the like. But without a continuous feed into her room, manual inspections must be maintained, and the Girl resists any and all efforts to truly subdue her. The first few exterminators sent in to ensure her continued health and safety are speedily dispatched and found tied up in the bathroom. A full floor lockdown commences until the Girl is found.

She tends to leave a trail where she goes. Glitching electronics, broken security feeds. She does very little to control her power to make every vaguely electrical aspect of the facility go absolutely haywire, which implies that she has no control over it whatsoever.

This, the facility soon learns, is not entirely true.

Once she breaks into her own digital files, the location of the access points into those databases are quickly relocated and acquire several new security measures. It's a noble attempt, but a pointless one. The Girl is, by her very nature, difficult to contain.

 _"There is no escape from this facility,"_ the Director of Better Living Industries herself informs the Girl via wall-mounted monitor. Her tone is measured and perfectly steady. No aspect of her unending frustration that the Girl has defied every possible attempt to be successfully curtailed shows. _"You know this."_

The Girl is fifteen years old. She has known nothing but the white walls of the structure dedicated to housing her and other threats to Better Living like her. 

"Maybe," says the Girl. "Why don't we find out?"

She places her hand on the monitor and, in a manner of seconds, the live feed from the Director cuts out to a wall of static.

The Girl makes an unerring line for the room's exit. She only looks over her shoulder once.

"Bye," she calls to the unmoving shape of the draculoid she clubbed unconscious to secure a weapon. She's not very good at shooting with a raygun yet, but she will be. She'll have to start learning if she wants to succeed at this.

She doesn't take the elevator. Too much could go wrong - they could too easily pinpoint her location (already easily tracked by simple virtue of what she is) and bring the entire thing to a screeching halt. She'll have to take the stairs, cover the facility floor by floor.

She mounts the stairs and makes it to the next level unimpeded.

One floor down. 

Fifty-three to go.

**\--**

**'O Virgin, no new, unexpected  
kind of suffering appears: I’ve foreseen them all  
and travelled them before, in my own spirit.**

**\--**

She makes it up to the fiftieth floor the first time. It's a question of choosing when to fight and when to run - when she can stay ahead of the eyes on her and when she needs to make a stand and cut down the opposition. Anyone in surveillance will know where she's going, based on the steady guttering out of each security feed as she goes. It's like she exhibits a radius of it, her wrath manifesting in the form of shorted circuitry and burned-out batteries. Locked doors can't stop her; they're all on an automated, electrical grid anyway. Security cameras can't keep up with her.

It comes down to BL/ind personnel to ensure she doesn't make it out, and almost everything here is run by draculoids. She gets overconfident, too self-assured in her capacity to predict their patrol movements and deal with them accordingly.

Then a five-drac entourage takes her off guard, disarms her, and drags her, screaming and fighting every step of the way, back down to the lowest depths. This is the first time she kills one of them, and it is mainly by accident. She squeezes the trigger of her pilfered raygun in the ensuing struggle and the bolt strikes one of the draculoids in the throat. It sinks to the ground with a rusted gurgle. The wound is quickly fatal. There's not much to be done about the crater of char and blood bubbling like pus from the impact in its esophagus.

The Girl gets very little time to adjust to the sensation of having just taken another's life. There's the ghost of a chill in her, a heaviness in her guts, but it all mixes in with the adrenaline tearing through her veins.

It doesn't keep the remaining dracs from hauling her back four levels and into her room once more.

 _"That was ill-advised,"_ the Director's unchanging countenance informs her via monitor, mere moments after her return.

The Girl shorts the feed out with a thought and slides to the floor, drawing her knees up to her chest, and seethes.

**\--**

**One thing I ask: for they say the gate of the King of Darkness  
is here, and the shadowy marsh, Acheron’s overflow:  
let me have sight of my dear father, his face: show me the way,  
open wide the sacred doors. **

**\--**

She makes it to the forty-seventh floor the second time. This time, she's certain to check the pockets of the draculoids she dispatches (kills). She only pauses for a moment when she executes the first one purposefully, studying with an almost clinical dedication the way the sensation settles in her soul.

She decides that she can bear that weight for however long it takes before she gets out. She knows what draculoids are; she was raised by them. She knows their higher brain functions are mostly nonexistent, that their souls are absent, that they are for the most part hollowed-out husks of whoever they once were. Death is, at this point, something of a mercy for most of them, she thinks.

The buzz and _zzt_ of ensuing raygun fire as she takes out two dracs down one of those long, white-paneled, interchangeable hallways is enough to alert more than mere patrols of her presence. She passes one of the clear, laserproof glass containment units, and this one actually houses someone both sentient and verbal - a rarity, here. Moreover, it contains someone who bothers to speak to her. 

"You headed somewhere?" The words are rough, as though scraped over disused vocal cords. The shape issuing them is shrunken and ragged and practically skeletal. The dark mop of hair is mottled brown, cut unevenly - like it's been cropped regulation-short but only partially.

The Girl is capable of recognizing that kind of style on sight. It's how she wears her own. It's one of those small, furious ways in which she has rejected BL/ind's determination to snap its strictures over her. They've attempted to force her into their preconceived notions of what she should be, her uniform crisp and her hair short.

She wears her hair tied back, having grown it long enough to _be_ tied back in thick dreads, because no matter Better Living's efforts, they have never been capable of curbing the spite that flourishes in her soul.

She's seen plenty of hollow-eyed souls holed up in their cells, and most if not all tend to ignore her. The fact that this one doesn't is the only reason she stops, she tells herself.

"Out," she tells the captive with a jerk of her chin upward. Forty-seven floors to go, but it's still the furthest she's gotten. Technically, she's wasting time by stopping and making conversation, but this is the first person in containment who's been both capable of and willing to trade words with her. That in and of itself is enough to give her pause.

"We're fifty-somethin' levels down," says the haggard shape. It leans toward the glass so that she can see the face beneath the untidy crop of dark hair. It's sallow, sunken, but the shape of the eyes and mouth and nose are subtly familiar in a way the Girl can't quite place. Like she's seen features like those before, maybe. She thinks that she must have.

The only face she's consistently known is the Director's. The dracs wear their masks, and exterminators keep their faces hidden behind the BL/ind logos. On the rare occasion she sees another human face, it belongs to one of the scarecrows that, on occasion, visit and walk these halls.

"Forty-seven," says the Girl. 

"Floor Forty-Seven," the prisoner breathes. "Damn. Guess I'm pretty important after all."

She chances a look down the hall, both ways. No one coming. Every moment she lingers here is a risk. But then, what is this escape attempt if not one massive risk in its own right?

"Who are you?" she asks.

"'S been a long damn time since anybody asked me that, sunshine." The answering grin is yellowed and uneven, on a plane askew from reality. It's the bitterest thing she's ever seen. "They've tried to wipe it outta me more times'n I can remember. Guessin' that's why I'm still here."

The Girl shifts from foot to foot, a nervous tic of energy she can't quite shake. The urge to _move_ and be anywhere else - it's overwhelming.

The prisoner stands. At the captive's full height, the Girl isn't that much shorter, but something about the upraised chin and the glint that enters the eyes lends a significant illusion of stature.

"You can call me Party Poison. Luneshine, leader of the Fabulous Four - and un-fuckin'-breakable." The words rasp, but they're spoken with a distinct note of pride nonetheless.

"Luneshine?" says the Girl, frowning.

"Old Zone lingo." A short burst of noise that the Girl mistakes for a cough at first, but soon realizes is a laugh. "Means you call me 'they' 'n 'them.' What about you, little bit?"

 _They_ and _them_ don't fall into one of the two categories that BL/ind uses to refer to everyone. But the Girl does not waver when she responds in turn. This is someone like her, someone who has refused to bow to the restrictions imposed upon them. And even if they cannot fight their way out the way the Girl can, she can admire that.

They're from the Zones. That makes them a rebel, a criminal. She knows the word for this. It's been drilled into her head a thousand times.

They're a killjoy.

An _important_ one, too, if they've been kept alive here.

"'She' and 'her,'" she tells them. Then, hesitantly, "is there...a word for that? In the Zones?"

"Earthshine." There's a glint in their eyes as they say it. "That makes you an earthshine, pintsize."

"Don't - " She almost corrects them for the moniker on reflex, then stops. The unearned overfamiliarity of the term, _pintsize,_ like they already know her, is arresting, and it ignites an ache in the heart of her that she can't wholly describe. "I don't know if I'm going to get out of here this time. So I'll probably see you again, Party Poison."

"Please, call me Poison. Party was my father." Another hacking stutter of sound that the Girl again mistakes for a coughing fit before identifying it as mirth, scraped out from underused vocal cords. "Y'gotta name, little bit?"

She does, in theory. She has a legal title assigned to her, like everything else.

"Just call me whatever," says the Girl.

"If you say so, babydoll." Poison's eyes glitter darkly behind the glass as they continue to grin crooked. "If I were you, I'd get movin'. Don't think they think very kindly of breakouts 'round here."

"Yeah." She adjusts her grip on her stolen gun, the edges of the white polymer finish digging into the creases of her joints.

She starts to move, then stops.

She looks over her shoulder at them one last time, and finds that they're watching her leave.

"It was nice to meet you, Poison."

Poison shoots her a lazy, two-fingered salute.

"Likewise, kiddo."

And then she goes.

**\--**

**I saved him, brought him  
out from the thick of the enemy, through the flames,  
on these shoulders, with a thousand spears behind me**

**\--**

She's right. They catch her on floor forty-five and send her back to the fifty-fourth floor.

**\--**

**Companion on my journey, he endured with me  
all the seas, all the threats of sky and ocean, weak,  
beyond his power, and his allotted span of old age.**

**\--**

It doesn't slow her down for long. Days later, she's back on floor forty-seven.

"'Sup, pintsize?" says Poison languorously as she passes their containment chamber. "Missed ya."

"You don't even know me." She means for the words to fire back with more bite than they actually do; as it is, they emerge sounding almost fond. She can't help it. She doesn't talk to very many people who actually have the wherewithal to respond in turn. For however long Poison has been here, it's miraculous that they've retained as much of their state of mind as they have, considering BLi's favor of memory-bleaching techniques.

"Well, ain't like dracs're great for conversation," says Poison easily. "And I like you better anyway."

The Girl tries to bite back the smile that threatens to tear across her features. "You must not get very many visitors."

"None of 'em as interesting as you," says Poison. "But I won't keep you. Good luck gettin' outta hell!"

The Girl snorts as she turns. Much as some part of her would like to remain, just to see what Poison remembers about the nuclear wastelands that are the Zones outside Battery City, she knows that, realistically, it won't be long before she sees them again. She'll be passing through on her next attempt anyway.

**\--**

**He ordered me, with prayers, to seek you out, humbly,  
and approach your threshold: I ask you, kindly one,  
pity both father and son: since you are all power, not for  
nothing has Hecate set you to rule the groves of Avernus.**

**\--**

She makes it up to the fortieth floor this time. And as it happens, she doesn't find a contingent of draculoids or exterminators waiting for her once she reaches the end of the hall.

Instead, blocking the exit to the thirty-ninth floor is as pair of scarecrows.

"Flare," says the Girl evenly, greeting them with a casual nod as if this were nothing more than a standard workplace meeting. "Sprawl. The Director put you up to this?"

Flare's smirk is a serrated edge, glinting white beneath the overhead fluorescents that always cast a sickly shine on her crop of orange hair. The vibrancy of it is just enough to make it seem unnatural, though the Girl knows it isn't. She knows by Flare's file that the scarecrow was born in the upper-class West Sector, and therefore had parents who could afford to partake in the inner city trends of genetic politicking, showering their kids with gene-twist augments that leave them standing out within the acceptable deviations of the Battery City standard. (The cheap offshoots affordable to low-income houses had less fortunate results; left whole swathes of kids with heterochromic mutations and skin mottled with vitiligo, to name but a few of those unacceptable phenotypes. Violently orange hair is easily disregarded as a rare but distinct possibility, but the second entire generations start carrying around mismatched pigments in their eyes, it all starts going to shit pretty quickly.)

Sprawl is broader, taller, and slightly darker, and consequently stands out less. His hair is untidy and black, almost matching the color of his eyes, and his smile gleams brighter because most of his front teeth are fake at this point. One of the hazards and perks of the job of scarecrow. He and Flare are inseparable, working best in concert with one another, and the Girl has read both their files and knows their favored strategies. She knows they're ruthless and uncompromising. She knows they have some of the highest kill counts ever recorded. She knows that if anyone were going to stop her, it'd be them.

"We were in the area," says Flare.

"You didn't have anything better to do?" The Girl's grip digs the handle of her raygun into the skin of her palm. If she moves for the nearest door to her left and it's unlocked, it might provide some measure of cover.

"Please," says Sprawl. "This shouldn't take long." He sweeps his hair out of his face with one hand. It's longer than it should be, but his high kill count affords him certain privileges. Among them is the privilege of straddling the line of what's acceptable in terms of presentation.

"We'll see about that." The Girl plants her feet, raises her gun, and wills her hands steady.

She lasts thirty seconds before they break both her arms and drag her back down below.

**\--**

**If Orpheus could summon the shade of his wife,  
relying on his Thracian lyre, its melodious strings**

**\--**

The benefits of being a subject of interest to Better Living Industries is that your physical well-being will always be excellently maintained. A broken limb that would ordinarily take six to eight weeks to heal fully can be repaired in just under one.

In the Girl's case, it takes two. She suspects that the Director would have ordered her arms continuously re-broken to ensure she would not persist in attempting to break out from the fifty-four storied _hell_ she's trapped in, but as it happens, the Girl's physical fitness ends up being required for several standard batteries of tests. And so her arms are speedily mended, even if she knows that it's done with reluctance and the next time she comes up against that roadblock, it'll hurt just as badly.

Sure enough, as soon as she's able, she sets off again and ignores the memory of her arms bent inwards on themselves like matchsticks, the glistening white of the bone protruding through the dark of her skin in pointed shards.

"Haven't seen you around in a bit," says Poison, when she passes their cell. The Girl sits down against the laserproof glass separating her from them and tears into a protein-compound ration bar she filched from a drac's pocket.

"Got held up," she says.

"Mm," hums Poison. "Missed seein' you."

It's said lazily, offhand, but she shifts and looks at them through the clear composite separating her from them. She searches their expression for some measure of sincerity. It's hard to say if there is one. So much of them is shadowed by their gaunt appearance and what must be years of confinement.

She wonders if she looks the same way to them. She can't say she's ever been _missed_ before.

"Not a lot must happen around here," says the Girl quietly, "for you to look forward to seeing me."

"Eh." Poison shrugs. "Like I said. You make better company than dracs do. One of these days you gotta share with me how a girl like you ends up stuck down in a place like this, and how the fuck you ain't been thrown in a cell yet."

She looks at the door keeping them in their cell. She has little doubt that she could disable the lock and let them walk free. But then she'd have to watch someone else's back on top of her own, and she can't even make it halfway out yet.

"It's a long story," says the Girl at last. "Maybe I'll tell you sometime."

Poison's smile is so heavy with melancholy that it feels a disservice to call it a smile at all.

"Yeah," says Poison. "I'd like that."

**\--**

**If Pollux, crossing that way, and returning, so often,  
could redeem his brother by dying in turn**

**\--**

Flare and Sprawl send her screaming back down five times in rapid succession. Every time it's on the fortieth floor, and every time they both laugh when she inevitably goes down.

Every time, she lasts a little longer.

**\--**

**And great Theseus,  
what of him, or Hercules?  
Well, my race too is Jupiter’s on high.'**

**\--**

"You keep comin' back to see me?" asks Poison.

"Don't flatter yourself," says the Girl. "Scarecrows are hard to get past."

"Don't I know it," says Poison, shaking their head with one eyebrow cocked in sympathy. "But all you really gotta do is look 'em up."

She frowns at them. If it were that easy, the fight would have been over about five attempts earlier.

"What do you mean?" It emerges as more of a demand than anything. 

Poison laughs. As rough as the sound always is, she's starting to welcome it.

"Crows, they got egos like nothin' else. Punch a hole in that, and it'll take 'em down a notch or two."

 _Ego._ The Girl can't say that psychological warfare has ever appealed to her, or that she's even made the attempt - not after everything she's seen and lived through here - but studying their files had been the _first_ thing she'd done, long before ever trying to break out of this place. Memorizing tactics, favored strategies...but she hadn't considered taking a different approach.

"I'll try that," she says. She doesn't think she fully manages to mask the surprise that the prisoner with even less freedom than her has managed to offer an insight that never occurred to her. "Thank you."

"'S worth it if you get to ghost some crows on the way out," says Poison, grinning toothily. "Oh, and hey, funny story - last time they was here, they tried _damn_ hard to convince me that you ain't even real."

"Why would they do that?"

Poison shrugs. "Keep me from gettin' any hopes up, I'm guessin'. Supposed to be no escape from this place."

The Girl looks down at herself, at the clean white cut of her BL/ind-issued clothes and the hair she had to fight tooth and nail to keep long enough to tie back.

"If I wasn't real, would you still talk to me?" she ventures.

Poison's head lists to one side, and they smirk.

"What d'you think?"

They like doing that, she's learned - answering questions with more questions and non-answers and outright ignoring questions entirely at times. She supposes she can't blame them. If she were in their position, she'd probably assume this all to be some sort of elaborate strategy to coax something out of her. Information, maybe. But she's never asked anything of them and she's not sure she'd know how to. She could look up their file, if she wanted...but she doubts that anything it contains would be half as reliable as whatever comes out of their own mouth here, even as isolated as they are.

The Girl lets her hair down, shakes it out, and unravels her tie from the thick locks. She feeds the tie through one of the little holes punched in the glass composite that allow for clear speech to filter through.

"Here," she says. "It's not much. But I made it myself."

She used bits of old twine and threads torn from uniforms to make it, bound it together in something almost like a braid. It's not the only one she has - hair-ties tend to go missing as easily as buttons and screws, she's learned - but every one of them is different. Patterned in varying strands of white and gray and black, all of them. This one is one of her favorites.

Poison catches it as it falls through to their side of their containment chamber. They cradle it in their palms like it's something precious.

"What for?" There's the barest flicker of suspicion in their eyes, a razor-sharp gutter of it that oddly suits them. If she'd known them before they were brought down here, she thinks that would have been more characteristic of them: a glaring, incisive display of unfiltered emotion.

"So you know I'm real," says the Girl.

Poison digests this. 

"All right," they say, shaking their hair from their eyes. "But this goes two ways. Y'got that?"

They feed something else back through to her - something dark and slender that flutters in the air before the Girl manages to trap it between her fingers.

It's a feather, ink-black and glossy as obsidian. 

She's never seen one up close before.

"...how do you have this?" she whispers. Despite her best efforts, she cannot help but be a little awed.

"The Witch leaves 'em for me," says Poison, quiet. "Checks up on me sometimes. Keeps me sane. Lets me know I ain't been forgotten just yet."

"The Witch?" The words leave a chill in the back of her throat, a phantom tingle down the length of her spine.

"The Phoenix Witch." Poison runs the Girl's hair-tie through their bone-knobby fingertips, absently twisting the coil of fabric between their hands. "Y'know Her?"

The Girl shakes her head.

"Mistress of fate 'n fortune. Guides the dead and takes souls home." Poison traces the bony ridge of one wrist. "Out in the Zones, what we'd do is wear a set of bad luck beads. Keep all the rotten luck on your wrist, so you'd always know where it is. Couldn't sneak up on you. They come from Her."

The Girl cups the feather in her hands and stares at it. It doesn't look like anything particularly notable, not on its own right, unless one takes into account the simple fact that it shouldn't be down here. It's a little sliver of the desert that should not, by any logical margin, have made it this far down in a high-security BLi containment facility. And given the impossibility of its very appearance, Poison should not be _giving_ it to her.

She's never seen a feather before. Not in person. Not up close.

"Maybe She'll give you a bit of luck," says Poison. "Next time you try to break outta here. Kick those crows' asses for you."

The Girl closes her hand around the feather and cups it to her chest. She's never been given a present before.

"Thank you," she whispers.

**\--**

**With these words he prayed, and grasped the altar,  
as the priestess began to speak**

**\--**

After the seventh successive defeat at Flare and Sprawl's hands (strangling her to the point of unconsciousness and near death, as she learns based on the pattern of bruising that persists for days after), she re-breaks into BL/ind's secure files on their scarecrows and scrolls to Flare and Sprawl's. It's not difficult. Not for her. She tends to disrupt electrical currents just by existing near them.

She reads everything she can on both of them. She focuses not merely on their weaknesses, but their successes - their scores, their histories, everything she can.

That night when she sleeps, she dreams.

The fabric of sleep doesn't bend easily to her. When she tries, it feels like an oily pudding, slipping endlessly from between her grasping fingers. She remembers things as shadows, as shapes, as twisting smoke-trails: the tickling of feathers against her cheeks, and a wide, ovular ghost-shape that seems to hover, suspended in darkness.

She remembers a choice offered to her between bandaged hands, hooked fingers cupped like massive spiders and so easily dwarfing her own.

 _You have my protection,_ grates a voice like crumbling stone in her mind's eye, _and you carry my gifts. But choose wisely._

The Girl wakes with a stale, fermented taste in the back of her throat, and a gritty texture scraping the roof of her mouth, as if she's swallowed a pocketful of sand. She catches the faintest whiff of incense and decay. She sits up and looks at the door situated across from the cot in her small, compact room.

She sees the grayed-out shade of an arm push the door open and the specter of an exterminator entering her room for its daily maintenance check.

Then she blinks, and the phantasm disappears.

A moment later, the door opens, and the exterminator enters. Its motions line up exactly with those she just witnessed.

The Girl smiles.

**\--**

**'Trojan son of Anchises,  
sprung from the blood of the gods, the path to hell is easy:  
black Dis's door is open night and day**

**\--**

"Thanks for the feather," the Girl tells Poison when she sees them next. She's not sure they'd understand the significance of the gift, but with its help, she's made much faster progress. She can see things moments before they happen, the trajectory of lasers and the actions that the draculoids and exterminators will take to stop her. The visions are fleeting, but they're enough to give her an edge that she previously lacked.

"Yeah?" says Poison.

"Yeah. And for the advice." She hazards a smile, tight and hard-angled. It pulls an answering one out of them. In that crooked flash of teeth sits something almost predatory, a vicious delight that just looks _right_ sitting on their features.

"Yeahhhh," says Poison, drawing the word out eagerly. "Give 'em hell, kiddo. And feel free to blow 'em a kiss from me."

**\--**

**but to retrace your steps, and go out to the air above,  
that is work, that is the task.**

**\--**

"You can't beat us, brat," says Flare. She's starting to sweep the area in precise, ever-widening arcs. This is consistent behavior when the fight goes on for long enough. She gets impatient, keen to end things, and resorts to hunting the Girl down instead of waiting for her to come to either of them - a necessity, given that they're at the only exit. This is also consistent with what the Girl knows of her from her file. But more than that, it's consistent with what the Girl knows about her now.

"Sprawl has caught me more times than you," the Girl calls from her hiding place. She's managed to kite the pair of scarecrows into one of the building's generator rooms, which allows plenty of cover but also bears the burden of far too many exposed electrical outlets and cables. She's giving away her position by calling out, and her nature makes it difficult to hide in a room with this much circuitry for _any_ span of time. The advantage she's been provided will have to be enough. She sees Flare twist around, making a beeline for her position. She's already darting away before it actually starts happening.

"Liar," says Flare.

"He scored higher than you in team-building exercises," the Girl adds. She ducks when Flare fires on her position. She has to squirm forward on her hands and knees, but Flare is coming for her at a rapid clip. She sees the trajectory of Flare's motion and moves the opposite direction, staying low to the ground.

"I scored higher than you on _everything,"_ says Sprawl, with a laugh. He doesn't tend to take these face-offs seriously. Flare has an edge to her that makes her slightly more dangerous. For the most part, she's the more competent of the two, but only just. They work best as a unit.

Their biggest failures have everything to do with when they _fail_ to function as a team.

"You did _not."_ Flare says it with a mild spurt of annoyance, but her attention is still locked solely on the Girl. The familiar flow and riposte of their back-and-forth is good. It means they're expecting this fight to go much the same way as the previous ones. "You could never beat me at target practice _or_ hand-to-hand."

The Girl settles her hand against the cool, grayish plane of the generator she's currently hunched behind. The telltale hum of electrical currents coursing beneath the metal is unmistakable, thrumming in attunement to the blood buzzing in her veins.

"Keep telling yourself that," Sprawl singsongs. They're getting to each other, if only slightly. She's just not sure it'll be enough.

She's done this dance with the two of them enough times to know their strategy here. If she times it exactly right, it might be her way out.

"His kill count is higher than yours," the Girl hazards.

"It's _not,"_ says Flare. She's definitely annoyed.

"When was the last time you checked?" says Sprawl. He's preening a little. "Makes sense. You _have_ gotten slower."

"I'm gonna - " Flare turns to glare at him from across the room. It's as far as she gets. The Girl presses her palm flat against the generator and blows out every circuit in the room simultaneously.

The cascade of yellow sparks and the sizzling burst of every wire and cable glitching into oblivion isn't quite enough to mask the Girl's dead-on sprint for the door. The chirp of Flare's laser fire chases her out into the main hall, but she spins on her heel, catches the door control with her fingertips, and _concentrates._

The door whirrs shut, and then she shorts out the controls with a short, sharp burst of energy - leaving the two scarecrows trapped behind several metric tons of vacuum-sealed pressure.

 _"Oh, you little bitch!"_ That's Sprawl, apoplectic. _"Let us out and fight fair!"_

Flare says nothing the Girl can hear. There's a low mutter, like she's speaking to Sprawl or possibly into a radio, but the Girl doesn't stay to find out. The longer the scarecrows are kept in one place, the more ground she can cover without them on her tail.

She makes for the thirty-ninth floor. 

It's the furthest she's ever gotten.

**\--**

**Some sons of the gods have done it,  
whom favouring Jupiter loved, or whom burning virtue  
lifted to heaven. **

**\--**

The thirty-sixth floor has fewer containment chambers, though the Girl isn't certain on that one. She weaves a meandering path as she searches frantically for the stairway up to the next floor. The entire place is built like a maze, and she knows it's just as much for the purposes of maximizing the use of the space available as it is for preventing escape. Despite living here for her entire life, she's never seen more than the bottommost floor until she began making the repeated efforts to crack open her tiny, self-contained world.

It doesn't help that nearly ever floor looks the same. When she passes most of the cells, they're empty. Clear laserproof glass composites separate her from the small compartments where other, less fortunate prisoners than her will be kept until they inevitably molder and decay or, worse, are deemed no longer worth the expenditure of resources and get a draculoid mask yanked down over their heads.

It's a shock when one cell appears to be occupied. The Girl hesitates for a moment, but there's a strange ghost of pressure on her chest when she looks at the dark shape leaned against the wall of their enclosure, and chooses to approach.

"Hello?" she says. The figure's head jolts up sharply, eyes snapping to meet hers - 

No. Eye, _singular._ The right one looks to have been gouged out, a dark stain of dried blood running down the slope of their cheek and congealed on their chin. The Girl jerks back.

"You - your - " She forces herself to breathe out, wills her heart-rate to slow. It's hardly the worst thing to have seen BLi do to someone. It's hardly the worst thing she's ever seen. She tries again, settling for a question that won't waste anyone's time: "...do you know which way to the exit?"

The figure studies her silently. The glare of the overhead lights makes it easier to pick out the particulars of their features, shadowed and haggard as they are. Long, thick hair growing in curls. No effort seems to have been made to prevent it from growing out. Their remaining eye is a dark, liquid brown. Their skin slightly lighter than her own, though still sufficiently dark in its own right. Wide nose. Full lips.

They continue to not answer her.

"Okay," the Girl says, gentler than she means to. It's hard to be exasperated with someone who's been stuck here for god knows how long, missing an eye. They're probably in shock. Or, like Poison, they don't expect that she's real. There's nothing she can really do to convince them of that. "Thanks anyway, I guess. I'll probably be by this way again sometime soon." 

She turns away, but a movement in the corner of her eye arrests her.

The shape in the cell is pointing. She follows the trail of their finger to the hall in question - the one immediately across from her, and not the one adjacent that she'd been steeling herself to enter.

She looks back at them, meets their gaze. Their expression is unchanged, their single eye unblinking.

"Thank you," she whispers.

She doesn't mean for the unexpected kindness to go to waste, but on floor thirty-five she's ambushed by a cluster of dracs that drag her, furious and flailing, all nineteen floors down and back to where she started.

**\--**

**Woods cover all the middle part,  
and Cocytus is round it, sliding in dark coils.**

**\--**

Even with the Witch's boon allowing her to perceive certain courses of action seconds before they happen, it takes her three consecutive tries - courtesy of Sprawl and Flare, who do not take their defeat at her hands very kindly - to get to the point where she meets the prisoner on the thirty-sixth floor again. She's not particularly searching for them, but she ends up out in front of their cell regardless. She doesn't realize it's them at first, not until they turn around.

"Your eye..." the Girl says quietly, because while she wouldn't have expected it to have miraculously grown back in the interim, the scar of its removal is somehow _fresher_ than it was when she saw this particular captive last. The blood staining their front is still fresh and scarlet, as though the eye in question was just...removed.

She steps closer, frowning.

"Did they do that to you?"

The prisoner shrugs.

"I'm sorry."

Another shrug. Their expression twists a little, but more like they're dismissing a minor annoyance, and not an injury as grossly invasive as a missing eye.

"I'm trying to get out of here," the Girl says. "It's taking a while, but every time it happens, I get a little bit farther. Maybe once I'm out, I can..."

She stops. She can't make promises here. She doesn't know this person. For all she knows, they could be here for a _reason._ But knowing BL/ind and its policies, the fact that they had no qualms with the ruthless and constant experimentation on a young girl who had to rip the knowledge of her origins from their digital grasp, she doubts it.

Perhaps more importantly, she can't make promises that might affect her focus. She needs to remember her goal of getting out of here, first and foremost. All else falls to the wayside.

The prisoner cocks their head slightly. They lower their chin, lift their eyebrows at her in a manner that _must_ be painful, given the injury to their face, but doesn't matter. They might not have said a word, but she can read their intent regardless.

"I don't have a name," she says. "I mean - not one that matters. I'm just...the Girl."

The captive nods, as though understanding. Maybe they do.

"...do you? Have a name, I mean?"

The corner of their mouth twitches.

They tap the center of their chest once.

"Jet Star." The words rasp. Like Poison, it's clear this person hasn't spoken in a long, long while.

"It was nice to meet you, Jet Star," says the Girl. She means it.

And the faint flicker of a smile on their features means that she thinks the sentiment is mutual.

**\--**

**But if such desire is in your mind, such a longing  
to sail the Stygian lake twice, and twice see Tartarus,  
and if it delights you to indulge in insane effort,  
listen to what you must first undertake. **

**\--**

"Do you know a Jet Star?" the Girl asks of Poison when she sees them two failed escape attempts later. She can't visit them with the kind of frequency she'd like, given that she doesn't need BL/ind wising up to what routes she takes and purposefully takes different paths each time, but she stops by whenever she can. She thinks, though she can't say for certain, that they've grown accustomed to seeing her. Maybe even looking forward to it.

Sometimes they're wearing her hair-tie around their wrist, like a bracelet, and it stirs something in her chest.

Poison scrambles to their feet at once when she says it, pressing their hands against the glass composite.

"Jet?" they breathe. She takes it to mean that they do, in fact, know a Jet Star. "He's _here?"_

Jet Star. He and him. She hadn't asked. She'd forgotten to ask. She won't next time, she resolves to herself silently. In every way possible, she intends to be BL/ind's contradiction, its opposite. It never asked her what she wanted to be, or anyone else, she doesn't think. She won't be them. Never.

"Floor Thirty-Six," says the Girl. "Only seen him twice so far. But he helped me, both times."

"He's alive." The word breaks when Poison says it. They hold a trembling hand to their mouth. It's nothing like the way she's seen them before. They're all proud poise and idle scorn, as if they can hardly be bothered to acknowledge reality as it is. The name in and of itself is enough to stop all of that dead in its tracks. "Fuck. Oh, _fuck."_

"Poison?" She presses a hand to the panel of laserproof composite, because they seem shaken in a way she can't fully reconcile with everything she's known of them prior to now.

"Fuck." Poison crumples to the ground, running their hands through their uneven hair. "Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck._ All this time? All this _fucking_ time - "

 _"Poison."_ She says it sharply, because she doesn't have time for much else. "Who _is he?"_

"He's one of my fuckin' crew, is what!" snaps Poison. "He was dead - I thought - _why would they - "_

So they assumed he was dead. But he was kept alive, like them. She's not sure why they _would_ assume that he'd be dead when they were kept alive, but she can guess.

"How long have you been down here?" the Girl asks quietly.

To that, Poison laughs. It's a jagged burst of sound, rasping and utterly mirthless and bordering on hysterical.

 _"Fuck_ if I know, pintsize. Years, probably. I - fuck. Jet. Those bastards kept him _alive."_

Their hands close into fists at their sides as they twist away from her in a jolt of abortive motion.

"You should go," says Poison, the words sharp. "You stick around, they'll catch you."

It's a dismissal if she's ever heard one. They need time to think, that much is clear.

"Okay," says the Girl softly. "I'll...probably see you soon."

She's only taken two steps when Poison makes a desperate, strangled noise that stops her in her tracks.

"Wait."

She looks back at them.

"If you can...if Jet's alive...tell him I'm comin' for him. Okay? Can you do that?"

She doesn't question the sentiment, that it's a hopeless sentiment, and that Poison has been trapped here and subjected to an unending litany of tests and procedures that have not, by some miracle, yet broken them. She doesn't question whether they mean it; the strength of the conviction behind their words is enough for her to believe that they do. They mean every word.

She nods.

"Of course."

**\--**

**Hidden in a dark tree  
is a golden bough, golden in leaves and pliant stem,  
sacred to Persephone, the underworld’s Juno, all the groves  
shroud it, and shadows enclose the secret valleys.**

**\--**

It takes her two more tries to reach Jet again. He reacts to her sudden appearance at once, unfolding to stand and stare at her. Just like before, his right eye is missing, though at least this time there's a pad of gauze taped over it.

"Poison's alive," she tells him without preamble. "Party Poison. They're on Floor Forty-Seven. They told me to - to let you know they're coming for you."

The reaction Jet has to that is immediate. His knuckles bleach white as he clenches his hands into fists, and a muscle in his jaw jumps.

She'd suspected before now, but his reaction to the title only cements that like Party Poison, Jet Star is a killjoy. And like them, he's important enough to have been kept alive.

"Poison?" His shock is no easier to bear than Poison's was. "They're...alive?"

"They are," the Girl confirms. "And - and I'm going to get you out. Both of you. Once I find a way out of here, I'll come back for you both. Okay?"

The wisdom of making uncertain promises be damned.

Jet shakes his head once, running a hand up through his tangle of hair.

"...no?" She stares at him. "What do you mean _no?_ You don't - this place is _hell._ You can't possibly _like_ it here."

He shakes his head again, though he doesn't elaborate over why.

"The others," he says instead, the words low and grating. "They here?"

"Others?"

He holds up two fingers.

"Fun Ghoul," says Jet. "Kobra Kid."

She shrugs helplessly at him.

"I don't know those names. I'm sorry." 

Jet's frame sags. He makes a faint, defeated sound in the back of his throat and slides down the wall until he's sitting, overlong knees jutting upward in an almost protective shell in front of him.

"I can look," the Girl says, though if she gave it more than a second's thought, she'd have to question the rationale behind the offer. She's trying to make it out of here, first and foremost. Losing her concentration to help someone she barely knows is a dangerous maneuver. She hasn't made it out into the open yet, and even once she does, there's no guarantee that she'll manage to claw her way out of the city itself.

But Jet looks at her, and his remaining eye is full of so much unveiled desperation that she can't possibly take it back now.

"I'll look for them," she tells him. "I promise."

She only hears Jet once she's already turned to keep running. The words are nearly inaudible, but she catches them regardless:

_"Thank you."_

**\--**

**But only one who's taken a gold-leaved fruit from the tree  
is allowed to enter earth's hidden places.**

**\--**

"You've been through this facility _how_ many times now?" sneers Sprawl. "Face it: you're never getting out."

"Gotten past you more than a few times," the Girl answers. She sees Flare lunging at her from behind a split second before it happens, and throws herself to the ground, rolls to evade. She's getting better at this. Her reflexes are sharpening, her aim is improving, and she grows ever more accustomed to taking advantage of the Witch's boons.

"Luck," says Flare. "Nothing more." She takes defeat harder than Sprawl does, though it grates at both of them. The Girl has faced Flare enough times and skimmed her file enough to know that she's a ruthless perfectionist; she can't bear to be beaten at something by anyone, particularly an untrained BL/ind test subject.

It makes those victories against her all the sweeter. Even if the Girl has help, that's one thing that Flare lacks. She and her scarecrow compatriots are competitive to the extreme. Even if they're technically comrades-in-arms, they all exist in opposition to one another.

The Girl has the Phoenix Witch's eyes and Party Poison's faith and Jet Star's gratitude. She might be fifteen and still finding her footing, but she's getting faster. She's not about to let herself be beaten - not by this, and not by a pair of scarecrows who are more preoccupied with beating one another than they are in actually stopping her.

She aims, she squares her shoulders, and she fires. She sees where Sprawl is going to end up before he himself does, and she clips him on the shoulder. He curses, but doesn't slow down. For scarecrows, high pain tolerance is practically a requirement.

That doesn't stop the Girl either. She keeps firing. She nails Sprawl across the chest once more, and he snarls in pain and frustration. It still doesn't keep from barreling toward her. She sidesteps, jukes, tries to make for the door - 

And then Flare grabs her from behind, and it's over.

**\--**

**This lovely Proserpine has commanded to be brought to her  
as a gift: a second fruit of gold never fails to appear  
when the first one's picked, the twig's leafed with the same metal.**

**\--**

Her dreams are full of talons and feathers and the slice of a white mask that gazes mutely at her from the abyssal emptiness that surrounds her, encompasses her utterly. She hears whispers like droplets of ice running down her throat (ice, which she has never seen, never actually felt, but knows of only in the abstract due to her rudimentary, barebones education and that which she gleans from her understanding of the way the world is technically meant to run) and she can never pinpoint the sources of them.

 _It'll take time._ The words are a feverish buzz in the corners of her mind. _You are resilient. You have the desert in your blood. You have fire in your soul._

The Girl breathes out the scent of rot and entropy when she wakes. She fingers the dark feather that she keeps on her person always now, that token granted to her courtesy of a prisoner who has become, for lack of any other word to describe them, something of a friend. They are an anchor, an unchanging figure from which she can chart her course.

When she makes it to Jet Star for the fourth time, she slides something through the holes of his containment unit to drop onto the floor. He lies still upon the ground, his back to her, but he stirs when she whispers his name through the barrier to him.

He turns, and his one-eyed face has grown familiar to enough to her that, when she realizes he now has _two,_ she flinches in surprise.

He shuts his right eye at once, scowling and cradling the right half of his face with one hand before he looks up at her inquisitively. She indicates the woven braid of thread she dropped into his cell with the tip of her stolen raygun, and he picks it up, inspects it carefully.

Strands break alone, but twisted together, they form a braid.

"It's..." The words dry up in her throat. She hadn't woven it like her other hair-ties. She made it for him, specifically, to wear like Poison does. "It's for you. In case they try to tell you that I'm not real."

Jet makes a rough sound in the back of his throat at that, almost like a laugh. It's as much a laugh as Poison's usually are, which is to say not very. It's sucked dry of humor, as bitter and acidic as clinging mold.

"...you got your eye back," she says, in the absence of anything else to say. Jet's scowl deepens.

"No," he says.

"No?"

 _"No."_ The word is firmer. He closes his fingers around the strand of fabric in his hand, clutching it tight.

"Oh," says the Girl, though she doesn't really understand and doesn't know if there's a polite way to ask. Her only caretakers have been dracs and exterminators. What do either of those parties know of manners? What did either of them care of her privacy?

They didn't. But she won't become them.

"Do you want to talk about it?" She doesn't have time for it, really. Not really. She needs to keep moving, before they catch up to her and stop her (again).

Jet shakes his head.

"Okay."

She begins to turn away, but Jet makes a gesture with one hand that stops her. She doesn't understand it, but it seems purposeful. It's complicated, a sigil drawn in the air with a fluid movement of fingers and a deft, twisting palm. He beckons her closer, and she acquiesces.

He slides something through the holes of his prison's laserproof glass composite barrier back to her, just the same as Poison did. It's not a feather, but an object that glitters silvery in the overhead fluorescents. She catches it in her palms and holds it up to the light. It's a thin sliver of wire, glinting cold.

Like the feather, it nestles in the crook of her. It's nothing more than an absent piece of scrap and shouldn't be noteworthy, save for the fact that it shouldn't be down here at all. It shouldn't survive here, in this containment area where anyone unlucky to be trapped down here is stripped of everything from freedom of thought to their very soul.

It's the Girl's turn to look at Jet Star with unspoken inquiry in her eyes, and he answers with a single word:

"Destroya."

**\--**

**So look for it up high, and when you've found it with your eyes,  
take it, of right, in your hand**

**\--**

There are records of an object called _Destroya_ , out in the desert. The Girl uncovers them once she's sent back yet again (thirty-third floor this time, stopped in her tracks by a band of exterminators with a furious Flare at the head) and breaks into BL/ind's secure digital filing system. _Destroya_ is the name assigned to a massive robotic prototype, long since abandoned in one of the inner Zones. How Jet Star managed to get his hands on a fragment of the thing and then _preserve_ it down here is beyond her. Why he would consider it important enough to pass on to her is just as unfathomable. It has not escaped her notice, though, that Jet's first instinct upon receiving something from a stranger was to give something to her in return. The very same as Poison.

The night after she receives the keepsake, she gets another dream.

This one crackles with electricity and spitfire. It's static and ozone. It's a charge building behind her eyelids, a jolt of roiling power building in the thready wirework of her nerves. She opens her mouth and the scream that issues from her is unending and white-hot. She feels like the fragile, fleshy shell of her body might tear itself apart at the sheer force of the energy humming in her bones, the gasoline tarred in her veins.

The Witch's words were like oil dripped over kerosene. They tasted soft and feather-dark and ashen and bitter as pus. She felt as chilly and as familiar as death.

Destroya is the opposite. Destroya tastes like blood, the hot-penny tang of it basting the roof of the Girl's mouth in a syrupy smear.

 _You see the currents._ They use her mouth to speak. It hurts like a limb that's been slept on wrong, full of pins and needles - a pain uncomfortable but nonetheless familiar, achingly so. _You have always seen them. Use them._

When the Girl wakes, it's because her heart has jumped into her throat. The metallic aftertaste of her dreams greases the lining of her throat.

She looks at the door, narrows her eyes at it, and this time it doesn't require the proximity of her touch. It acquiesces to her will with a thought.

Whatever _Destroya_ is, she's not sure she can trust that it's little more than a defunct robotic unit left stranded in the dust. Not with that building voltage in her fingertips. It's something vaster. It had _felt_ bigger, sprawling across the void-dark expanse of her subconscious and expanding so much further that it was impossible to see its edges.

The Girl's smile is a self-satisfied slash cut into the side of her mouth as she gets up, ties her hair back once more, and once again prepares to leave.

**\--**

**Since, if the Fates have chosen you,  
it will come away easily, freely of itself**

**\--**

She tears through the facility with the strength of two gods at her back. She surpasses Sprawl and Flare, redirecting the blasts of their rayguns with a shout and a jarring bolt of pain to her temples, showering them both with sparks when Destroya's power blows out every light in the room. Her aim suffers from the lack of visibility, but it's not hard to shoot out Sprawl's knees when he's five feet away from her. When Flare tries to compensate for her partner's inadequacy, the Girl sees her forward rush coming with the Witch's foresight and manages to trip her, cracking the butt of her raygun across the back of the scarecrow's head. When Flare lies there stunned and groaning, the Girl bolts for the exit.

She finds Jet on the thirty-sixth level, as always. He doesn't look as though he's been waiting for her, but he doesn't look surprised to see her either.

His right eye is missing again. This time the wound looks older now, the blood dark and crusted over around the pitted gouge in the right side of his face.

"Thank you," the Girl says, a little breathless from the speed of her latest attempt. This is the fastest she's made it out yet. "Destroya...do they look after you?"

Jet nods once, shortly.

The Girl fingers the tie in her hair, now bearing both a silvery thread of wire and a night-dark feather.

"The Witch watches over Poison," she says. "That's what they told me."

Jet's expression creases a little. He doesn't respond to that. Not immediately.

"Maybe She's looking over the others in your crew too," the Girl ventures.

Jet's eye darts away.

"Maybe," he says, but there's not much conviction behind it.

The Girl glances over her shoulder. She doesn't have much time.

"Do they do that to you?" She fires the question off sharper than she means to, and Jet's gaze snaps to her at once. She indicates the darkened mass of dried blood clinging to the right half of his face. "Every time?"

Jet shakes his head.

"They _don't_ do that to you?" She frowns. "Then..."

Jet taps at the curve of his brow over the empty socket with one finger.

"They want a way in." He closes his hand over the vacant pit where his right eye should be. It forms a fist, then drops away. "Not happening."

It takes her a long moment to parse what he's getting at.

"So you...oh." The Girl has seen and _felt_ firsthand what BL/ind is capable of, what it _does_ to those in its captivity. She's witnessed it personally, been _subjected_ to it frequently enough to have assumed she's seen the worst and most wretched extent of it.

She thought wrong. The thought of him committed to doing that kind of painful, intense procedure to himself, _repeatedly,_ is almost enough to turn her stomach. There's a long, long moment in which she tries not to look horrified. She doesn't quite succeed, if Jet's wry, humorless smile is any kind of judge.

"Every time?" she whispers.

Jet nods.

There's a static buzz in her veins and a need to _run_ , like embers beneath her feet, but all she can think of is Jet Star, crouched in the corner of his cell, forcibly prying a part of his head clean from his skull often enough for him to have grown used to doing it regularly.

There's not much she can think of to say to that, aside from the obvious. It's only obvious to her because she feels that, on some level - while she can't entirely relate to the act itself - she can relate to the unshakable and focus to not allow Better Living to get under his skin.

"Does it get easier?" she asks him.

Jet Star shakes his head. His answer is as steady as his gaze: 

"You get better at living with it."

**\--**

**Otherwise you  
won't conquer it by any force, or cut it with the sharpest steel.**

**\--**

At the twenty-fifth floor, someone new stands in her way. She doesn't recognize this one. It's not a scarecrow, or a draculoid, or even an exterminator. Some new BL/ind tactic, though she can't say that she thinks much of this, whatever it is.

If she had to guess, she'd gauge them as a new attempt at reeducation. Behavioral control. Their dark hair has been cropped short, the lower half of their face caged in a sort of...muzzle, she supposes the word would be. A metallic cage extends beneath their chin, terminating just above the bridge of their nose. It wraps around their head, secured with a series of metal clasps along the back of their head and neck. Their eyes are dark and unfocused.

"Hello," she says, because it's best to start things on civil grounds, if possible.

The moment she speaks, they're upon her. They move sidelong, shambling like an animal. Faster than she can react, they pick the Girl up by the front of her jacket and begin slamming her head into the wall. They keep at this until her head fills with stars and the world goes dark. She wakes back on the fifty-fourth floor with her ears still ringing.

**\--**

**And the inanimate body of your friend lies there  
(Ah! You do not know) and taints your whole fleet with death**

**\--**

"Is he doin' okay?" Poison asks it every time she sees them now. They're desperate for news of the only other living member of their crew, and she can't blame them.

"As okay as he can," she tells them, every time. She's not sure how best to inform them that Jet Star _seems_ about as fine as he's likely to get, except that every time BLi tries to give him a replacement eye, he gouges it out almost immediately and then lets the wound simply _sit_ there until someone else does something about it.

"Poison?" Jet asks, every time she sees him.

"They're worried about you," she tells him, because it's true. Jet nods, as though it's not surprising. He wears the braided twine she made for him like a bracelet, the same way Poison does.

She passes whatever messages between them that she can. Worries. Fears. Hopes. Prayers.

She sees them often enough that it becomes almost routine. As routine as any of this can _get._

**\--**

**while you seek advice  
and hang about our threshold.**

**\--**

"The Director's going to figure out how to keep you on a _leash,_ brat!" spits Flare, one hand tight around the Girl's ankle as she drags her down to the ground. The Girl kicks out with her other foot, _slams_ it into the scarecrow's face until she's rewarded with a sickening _crack_ and a gout of red spattering across the ground. Flare curses but doesn't let go, not until the Girl manages to dig the heel of her boot into her eye socket. This time Flare _does_ let go.

"That's for Jet Star," the Girl growls at her.

 _"Who?"_ says Sprawl. The Girl silences him with a shot to the chest. His uniform eats most of the blast, but the kinetic force of it is enough to bowl him over and give the Girl the opportunity to bolt out of the room.

She's not as lucky with the obstacle she's begun encountering regularly on the twenty-fifth floor. They don't have a name, or anything distinguishing about them save for the sadistic cage their face is bound up in. They wear the same drab white garb as anyone else who might be stuck in a containment unit. Their feet are bare, their hands perpetually ground up into fists or reaching for her in clawing swipes. All attempts to trade words with them are answered solely with grunts, when the prisoner bothers to answer at all.

They're quicker than they should be. They sprint at her and take her down quickly, each and every time. She could fire on them, but they're just as much a victim of Better Living as the Girl is - as Poison and Jet are, as _anyone_ subject to BLi's cruelty is. She doesn't want to hurt them.

Doesn't mean she won't.

Trying to snipe them down hasn't worked, little as she wants to try. In desperation, she'd unleashed a scattershot flurry of laser fire. She'd managed to hit them several times over, but it hadn't even slowed them down. Their complete refusal to so much as acknowledge the injuries means it's just a waste of time. It's like they don't _notice_ when she lands a hit and punches a laser burn into their skin.

She gives up on the attempt at mowing them down from a distance and swaps her gun for trying to overpower them hand to hand, stun them into making an error that might allow her to slip past. But they're _fast,_ faster than her Witch-sight can anticipate. Sporadic, unpredictable, moving in bursts of kinetic force that are difficult to counter. The most she can do is lash out and hope that her blows connect with enough force to slow them down, which they rarely do.

 _"Your progress seems to have slowed,"_ the Director observes, safe behind the cover of her wall-mounted monitors. She watches the Girl brazenly preparing for yet another escape attempt, tearing an unlucky draculoid's jacket into cloth strips to wrap around both her hands for some minimal protection, should it come to needing to pulp a drac's face in with her fists. Or, more accurately, hit it repeatedly until it lets her go and she can incinerate its guts for real.

The Girl doesn't answer.

 _"Our latest prototype is a work in progress,"_ the Director continues. The words are mercury as she speaks, silver and sidling. She doesn't acknowledge the Girl's preparations, and the Girl doesn't acknowledge the Director at all. _"But he seems to be functioning as intended. He spent so very much time in captivity acting like an animal that we elected to indulge that instinct rather than suppress it. And since then, his progress has been exponential."_

Something in her stomach twists, acid and bile.

_"You are never going to make it out of here."_

For the first time, the Girl looks at her. Dead in the eyes.

"Maybe I don't want to make it out of here," she says. "Maybe I just want to put my next shot between your eyes."

The Director switches off the feed.

**\--**

**Carry him first to his place  
and bury him in the tomb.**

**\--**

It takes a dozen attempts before the Girl drops the raygun, forgoes it entirely, and simply sits on the floor across from the BL/ind test subject. He, if he does consider himself a _he_ per the Director's suggestion, paces, watching her with wild, almost _hungry_ eyes, but does not attack. She's always the one to make the first move, and that's what's consistently gotten her stuck back at the start.

"I'm sorry," she tells him softly. The subject doesn't answer. He continues to stalk back and forth, his hands working into fists and out again. They seem almost skeletal with how wasted he is beneath his too-large garments. "I know that they did this to you."

She has a hunch. She's not certain about it, and she hadn't mentioned it to either of her friends before. She hadn't mentioned this particular obstruction at all. She doubted it would be helpful at all for them to know, especially if her hunch turns out to be correct.

"I have a friend who's been hurt by BLi too," the Girl continues. "Their name is Party Poison."

The subject stops.

"Another friend of mine, he's called Jet Star. He's stuck in here too. Do you know him?"

The subject's stare becomes hungry, almost desperate. A faint, whining tone escapes the back of his throat.

The Girl doesn't stand. Doesn't look away. She holds out a hand, palm up, as though offering her assistance.

"I can take you to them. If you want."

She's not certain on which one of them this is. Fun Ghoul or Kobra Kid. But she remembers the names from when Jet mentioned them, and if Poison and Jet are still alive, then maybe the other two are too. And Better Living has never shied away from repurposing their resources for their own gain.

The subject grips the sides of his head, huddles down on the ground, and the sound he makes almost has words.

 _"Rrnnn..."_ he hisses between gritted teeth. The sound is pained, wheedling out from behind the cage clamped over his face. _"Pois..."_

_That all but confirms it._

_"They're here. They're alive," she presses on. "They're both worried about you."_

_She rises from her seated position until she's on her knees, inching closer._

_Then the subject tears to his feet, charging for her with maddened, shining eyes. This time his snarl _does_ have words, hoarse and agonized:_

__"THEY'RE - DEAD."_ _

And he sends her back below.

__

**\--**

**Lead black cattle there:  
let those be your first offerings of atonement.**

**\--**

The first time she gets past him is an accident.

She's certain that he's one of the two of the names that Jet unwittingly offered to her. She's also certain that, if Jet or Poison were to know what became of this member of their crew, it would destroy them utterly. The Director had indicated, _hinted_ really, that whatever her plans for this particular subject are, they're not quite done yet. Once they are, she'll probably make short work of Poison and Jet both.

Where before she'd had nearly infinite attempts at her disposal, that isn't the case anymore. Every run she wastes is a run that might be the last before the Director decides to twist the knife where her pet killjoys are concerned, and the Girl isn't about to let that happen.

It's not just about getting out anymore. It's bigger than that.

"They're _not dead!"_ she says to the subject the next time she encounters him. He snarls at her as he lunges in her direction. She focuses on the lights until every bulb gutters out, leaving the air dark and electric with the smell of fried circuits.

She feels him dart past her - _past_ her, and she doesn't waste a moment even if her heart skips a beat at the shock of it. She makes for the door. She _sprints_ for the door until she reaches the exit, and then it's up the flights of stairs, further up, stranding him behind her.

"I'll come back for you," she promises to the empty air. No one can hear her; not even the security cameras can track her words through the dense wall of static she projects into each and every one of them, merely by existing in their vicinity.

She has the opportunity to keep going, so she takes it while she can.

It feels like there's a tangible shift in the air quality. It's not _real,_ she knows. Logically, she knows it. It's all the same recycled air, tasting plastic and too clean. Her whole life, she's breathed the same air. She's closer, by mere degrees, to finally breaching her captivity and setting foot on the world above.

It's close enough for her to feel it. Excitement is a rattling hitch in her bones, a low-grade anxiety germinating underneath her tongue.

The road is only going to get more and more difficult from here.

**\--**

**Only then can you look on the Stygian groves, and the realms  
forbidden to the living.'**

**\--**

She reaches the twenty-second floor before someone breaks the monotony of the seemingly endless hallways.

"You don't belong here."

She wrenches around, her raygun whipping up in preparation to loose a salvo of heated plasma. The speaker turns out to be in one of the containment chambers yet again, only this captive has had quite a few extra steps taken on their behalf. Unlike Poison and Jet, who have been allowed the freedom to more or less roam within the confines of their cells, this one has been constrained by several additional factors: a heavy metal clamp binding their wrists behind their back and a tether winding up to secure the restraints to a ring mounted on the cell wall, paired with a set of heavy fetters around both ankles with a short length of chain between them to limit mobility.

And those are just the ones she can _see._

Their dark hair has been buzzed down to a close-shaven stubble hugging their skull, and while they don't seem as utterly withered away as Jet or Poison, they seem tired, almost resigned in a way that the other two aren't. But they look at her with a clearer gaze despite their red-rimmed eyes, their head tilted slightly to one side as they study her carefully.

"I don't," the Girl confirms warily. "Do you?"

The captive laughs, a sardonic, mirthless bolt of sound.

"Depends on who you ask."

Her hand creeps up to the feather threaded into the tie she uses to hold back her hair. It feels ordinary beneath her fingertips when she strokes it lightly. It always feels exactly like what it is: a feather, and nothing more. Not an unearthly talisman gifted by the Phoenix Witch, not a token infused with death itself. Just a feather.

But the Girl knows what it is. Who it came from. The Witch is watching her, she's sure of it.

Poison called Her the _mistress of fate and fortune._ In a facility as massive and sprawling as this one, the Girl has to wager that _fate_ has had quite a hand in the path she's taken to get her to this point, to this position in the road where she can look at this stranger and wonder if she already knows who they are.

"You're the third person to call out to me," she tells them. "Everyone in this facility...they know better than to talk to me. It makes them a target."

Again, the prisoner laughs.

"Little bit, I'd be fuckin' _shocked_ if they could think of somethin' new to do t'me that they ain't already done."

It's the same kind of unprompted, idle familiarity that Poison exhibited the first time they met. It startled her then. Now, it summons something bittersweet and aching in the back of her throat instead.

"I guess that's true," says the Girl. "Were you a killjoy?"

"Still fuckin' am." The captive bares their teeth. Despite the worn, lined nature of their features, their grin is almost predatory. "Took the freak outta the fight but can't take the fight outta the freak."

"What should I call you?" she asks, because it seems polite. "Are you a...luneshine?"

"You _know_ that word?" The prisoner sounds amused as they say it. _"Damn._ What're they teachin' kids in containment these days? Teachin' them all the fun Zone _slang?"_

"I picked it up," says the Girl. "So. Are you?"

"I'm whatever the fuck I want to be," they say with a grin. It's not much of an answer, but she doesn't have a lot of time to mince words.

The Girl runs her thumb over the thin arch of the wire threaded into the keepsake she wears in her hair, and makes a decision.

"Are you Fun Ghoul?" she asks. "Or are you Kobra Kid?"

The shift is instantaneous. Every limb in the captive's body goes rigid as they slam up against their restraints. A vein in their neck bulges as they snap at her, their eyes wide and wild.

"Who told you those names?" they hiss. "Who the _fuck_ told you?"

The Girl keeps her feet rooted in place, and she doesn't flinch. She meets their eyes steadily. She's braved worse than someone trapped by several different means of BLi containment. For all the dracs and exterminators she's faced, for all the times she's thwarted Flare and Sprawl and scaled the floors of the containment facility, it's this nameless prisoner's absolute rage and desperation that speeds her pulse and makes her stomach drop into her toes.

"Jet did," she tells them honestly.

"Jet?" The killjoy's eyes blaze. They strain pointlessly against the manifold locking mechanisms keeping them in place. Their head drops and sags forward. She glimpses, sunk into the skin of their back around their spine, a set of metallic hooks and pins whose purpose she can guess at, even if she would really rather not.

"He's alive." She can hear the sound of approaching klaxons. The fact that alarms are sputtering back to life, emergency lights flickering back on, means that a contingent of BL/ind employees are in rapid pursuit. She shifts her weight. She can't delay much longer.

"Jet. Fuck, _Jet..."_ The words are thick when the killjoy breathes them.

She can't stay. Not now that she can hear the distant shouts, the guttural sounds that are _almost_ recognizable as words. Draculoids.

"I have to go," she says. "I'll be back - you'll see me again. I promise."

She can't really make that kind of promise. Not when her efforts in getting to this point were so reliant on mere luck and chance.

Unless it was fate that guided her steps. At this point, the Girl can't be sure anymore.

"Wait - _wait."_ The word cracks when the killjoy calls it. The Girl looks back over her shoulder, meets their eyes.

"Tell Jet," they breathe at last. "Tell him - tell him I'm alive."

She nods, and starts moving. She almost misses what they call after her.

"Tell him _Fun Ghoul's alive!"_

**\--**

**You gods, whose is the realm of spirits, and you, dumb shadows,  
and Chaos, Phlegethon, wide silent places of the night,  
let me tell what I have heard**

**\--**

As she suspected, it's more difficult getting past the obstruction on the twenty-fifth floor. Poison and Jet call to her eagerly whenever they see her now, desperate for an update.

Poison takes the news of Ghoul better than Jet does. They laugh, throw their head back in sheer elation, and the sound might be agonized in how desperate it is, but there's an ache of relief pinned behind it all the same.

"Fuck," says Poison. "Fuck, I should'a - should'a guessed. They keep _all_ of us alive outta fuckin' _spite?"_

"I don't know," says the Girl, because there's one of their number still unaccounted for, but she's not sure how likely it is that _Kobra Kid,_ whoever that is, is actually still alive. Assuming she's right about where she thinks he is. She's not about to say anything, not until she knows. Not until she knows for _certain._

By the time she has to leave, Poison has sobered enough to press their hands against the walls of their confinement, training their too-intense, too-incisive look on the Girl.

"If you can get to 'em again," Poison whispers, "tell him I'm comin' for him."

"I will," she tells them, even if, like the case with Jet, she doubts that this is ever going to be possible.

But then again, she was never supposed to make it this far either.

**\--**

**By your power, let me  
reveal things buried in the deep earth, and the darkness.**

**\--**

Flare and Sprawl no longer trouble her consistently. She can get past them and it gets easier and easier each time. She still struggles to so much as understand the second obstacle, the borderline mute, inarticulate prisoner that BL/ind has elected to set upon her. The _prototype,_ the Director called him. Prototype for what, the Girl is certain she doesn't want to find out.

"Are you him?" she asks him quietly. "Are you Kobra Kid?"

The captive's shoulders heave with deep, erratic breaths as he screws his eyes shut at mention of the title. His shoulders hunch.

"Your crew is alive," she presses on. "All of them. I can take you to them."

His hands snake up over his ears, pressing down, like that might blot out the sound of her trying to tempt him away from his position.

She takes a step forward. He flinches back.

Then he contorts, his back arching in a pained, unnatural convulsion of clenching muscle. She feels the charge in the air coursing through his nervous system before she hears it - the pitched whine of live circuits. An electrical current forcing the sustained contracture of muscle, a tetany designed to induce obedience. She's seen it done countless times before. They tried it on her, before they realized it wouldn't have any effect on someone who's practically a live wire in her own right.

He charges her. His hands hook around her neck and before she can _think_ about the best way to claw out of his grip, her vision's gone spotty.

**\--**

**On they went, hidden in solitary night, through gloom,  
through Dis's empty halls, and insubstantial kingdom**

**\--**

"I think I know where Kobra is." She says it to Jet first, because his reactions are quieter. It makes them harder to gauge, but it's easier to keep moving after that. It's a selfish instinct. She just doesn't want to have Poison's frozen, horrified expression engraved in the contours of her mind while she tries, yet again, to fight her way out of this white-walled hell.

Jet looks at her. Another pad of gauze has been taped over his right eye. She's lost count of how many times he's pried it out by now. He probably lost count long before now.

"I think he's in my way up ahead," the Girl says. "They did something to him. But I think I know how to fix it."

Jet's gaze is fixed. His hands have formed fists against the barrier separating them.

 _"Did_ something?" he rasps. The words tremble in a way she can't ignore but pretends to, for his sake.

The Girl nods. She's already moving, her shoulders set. Jet's stare burns into the back of her head. She feels it, but she doesn't stop or slow down.

"I'm going to fix it."

**\--**

**Like a path through a wood, in the faint light  
under a wavering moon, when Jupiter has buried the sky  
in shadow, and black night has stolen the colour from things.**

**\--**

She's going to fix it.

She felt the electrical charge in him when he got close enough to her to wrap his fingers around her throat. If there's one thing she can do, it's target _that._

The next time the Girl faces him, she throws her gun aside and circles him slowly. He circles her in parallel, a movement that seems mostly unconscious. Behind the cage on his face, he eyes her warily.

"Come and get me, Kobra Kid."

She rushes him first. When he races to meet her, she reaches out with everything she has. Her soul buzzes with unspent energy. It's not hard to find the blemish in the electrical grid of his nervous system. There, at the base of his neck - some kind of chip sunk into the meat of his upper back, probably implanted there a long, long while ago. All she has to do is push a finger of power into it, and it glitches and breaks.

Again, Kobra convulses. He stumbles, ends up on his hands and knees, clawing at the place where the chip must be located. She'd thought there was no way he would have felt it, but she must have thought wrong. 

"Kobra." The Girl slows at once, stops opposite to him, and holds up both hands with her palms out. "It's okay. They can't hurt you like that anymore."

He pants inarticulately on the ground, his eyes clouded with confusion.

Steadily, the Girl kneels so that she's level with him.

"Poison is still alive," she tells him gently. "So are Jet and Ghoul. I can show you. They miss you."

Kobra twitches. He doesn't look at her. Is he even taking any of this in?

Distant sirens. Exterminators closing in on her in pursuit. She can run or she can stay and fight, but the former is the only option that's going to take her any further than she's already gone.

She holds out a hand to him.

"Come with me," she says.

Kobra's stare is utterly lost when he finally locks eyes with her.

Maybe that's why he takes her hand and lets her lead him to the exit.

**\--**

**Right before the entrance, in the very jaws of Orcus,  
Grief and vengeful Care have made their beds,  
and pallid Sickness lives there, and sad Old Age**

**\--**

"Kobra?" Ghoul tugs against urgently his manifold restraints when she finally reaches his cell. Kobra flinches away from the sight of him at first, but the initial hesitance doesn't last long.

"Gh - " His throat contorts, clenching arduously as he swallows and seems to have to take conscious steps to speak properly. He shifts forward, sidelong, inch by inch. The word is rough, rusted as nails scraped over metal. _"Ghoul."_

 _"Shit,_ man." Ghoul laughs, breathless. "What'd they _do_ to you?"

Kobra's gaze goes distant, his hand creeping up to the back of his neck. His fingers trace a patch of skin just over his right shoulder, where the chip used to control him still resides. It's fried now. Dead in the water. If they want to get him back under their thumb, they're going to have to work at it. And if they succeed, the Girl is a walking EMP. She'll shut it down again, and again, and again. As many times as she has to.

"I need to go," she tells them both. "Kobra - I can't promise they won't find you again."

He looks at her steadily.

"If they do - if they send you after me again - I'll get you out. Okay? I promise I will."

More promises she's not certain she can keep. But she has a third gift in her pocket, a strip of woven thread she twined together not long after she decided how best to approach him. She presses it into the lax curve of his palm, and his fingers close around the gift in a manner that seems instinctive rather than intentional.

"Keep it," she tells him. Then, to Ghoul: "When you get out of there, I'll make you one too."

"Aww," says Ghoul, putting his head to one side with a wince that suggests the action is actively painful. "That's sweet of ya, Girlie. Now you should _really_ get goin' before the pigs catch up."

The Girl nods, makes to pull away, but Kobra catches her wrist with his free hand and stops her.

Like Poison, like Jet, he presses something into her hand in turn. A gift for a gift. An exchange. She stares at the object when he passes it to her, trying not to get lost in the dizzying kaleidoscope of swirled colors in the little glass marble he passes to her. She doubts he'd be capable of articulating how it is he managed to hold onto something like that all the way down here, but either way she suspects she knows the answer to it already.

Like the other members of his crew, he's being watched by something bigger. And it wanted to ensure that some germ of its presence could survive.

"Thank you," she whispers to him.

 _"No,"_ he says back, the word ragged. _"Thank you."_

The naked gratitude in his expression follows her all the way through the uppermost levels of the facility.

**\--**

**And Fear, and persuasive Hunger, and vile Need,  
forms terrible to look on, and Death and Pain:  
then Death’s brother Sleep, and Evil Pleasure of the mind**

**\--**

On the tenth floor, she hits a form of opposition both new and familiar.

She recognizes this one. He's one of the highest ranking scarecrows, though recently he's begun to flag as both Sprawl and Flare lobby for his position.

Thus far, she's avoided having to face him directly. He ranks too high, has been thus far too important, to be pulled away from his work to take care of a nuisance like her. She knows him by his numbers, by his kill counts. He is a terrifying statistic. His work takes him into the desert, out across the Zones, where he hunts down killjoys and tears their rebellions up from the roots.

"Hello, Korse," the Girl says smoothly. His expression, when he regards her, is unchanging. He looks identical to the picture of him in his file. It's as though he's barely aged.

With scarecrows being what they are, it's not surprising that his age is reflected inaccurately. One can never gauge a scarecrow's age by appearance alone.

Korse doesn't answer her. He holds up his gun, the barrel pointed toward the ceiling. It's a courtesy gesture. The Girl does not mirror it. She holds her gun ready at her side, her finger tight around the trigger. She has two gods pooled in her soul, the bright tin-rattled-buzz of their whispers in her head.

"The Director must be getting desperate," says the Girl, "to have sent _you_ to stop me."

Korse says nothing. He merely raises his gun and he fires.

She sees the bolt coming an instant before it does. She swerves to avoid it - 

Not quickly enough.

It strikes her square in the chest, hemorrhages heat and char into the back of her throat. She tastes her own death in a heat-sticky swell of ozone and effluvium in the same moment she hits the ground.

 _Well,_ says a voice like smoke. _That was fast._

**\--**

**And, on the threshold opposite, death-dealing War,  
and the steel chambers of the Furies, and mad Discord,  
her snaky hair entwined with blood-wet ribbons.**

**\--**

The Girl opens her eyes. Her breath crisps in her throat as she breathes in, rolls over, and then Korse's hand is fisting into the fabric of her jacket, wrenching her upright. There's a flicker of something almost like worry in his gaze, perhaps a concern that he might have accidentally _killed_ her.

He can't possibly realize that he _did_ kill her. She's certain he did, even as her heart jumps sporadically against her ribs. She felt it all come apart, felt herself _detach_ from the flesh-and-bone shell that clothes her. She has the vaguest memory of something ghost-pale in the corner of her eye, words spoken in a hushed undertone -

And she understands.

Some figure in the pantheon guarding her back must have granted her an extra chance. If she had to guess, she'd say the Witch - She guides the dead, doesn't She?

The Girl doesn't get a chance to take advantage of it, not this time. Instead, Korse hauls her all the way back down to the Director and ends her run there.

She doesn't hear anything about Kobra or Ghoul, and what became of either of them. She supposes she'll find out when next she fights her way out of here.

**\--**

**In the centre a vast shadowy elm spreads its aged trunks  
and branches: the seat, they say, that false Dreams hold,  
thronging, clinging beneath every leaf.**

**\--**

She tells Poison about Kobra next.

"I found the last member of your crew." She says it in a rushed undertone, pressed up against the wall of their prison because she _ran_ to make it here, to allow herself as much time with them as possible. Poison is on their feet at once. The inch-thick glass composite separating them from her isn't enough to cut the power of their stare, the mingling horror and hope that manages to shine with absolute clarity. The fact that Poison can even hold hope to themself at all at this point should be absurd - but the Girl has been at this for a long time now, and she's no closer to giving up either.

"He's alive," she tells them first. "I don't know what they did to him. They put him in my way, but I fixed it."

"You _fixed it,"_ Poison repeats, the words tight. "The hell does _that mean,_ pintsize?"

"It means he'll be _okay,"_ says the Girl. She meets their gaze evenly, even if the depths of their emotion are nigh-volcanic. "I'll make sure of it."

"You better." Poison somehow manages to make this sound like a threat, even if they're the one trapped and can't possibly follow up on it. They do that. They make these furious statements with every ounce of conviction they can possibly bring to bear, and in those moments it feels like reality itself will simply bend to accommodate them.

"I'm going to get you out of here," the Girl whispers. She presses her forehead against the glass, closes her eyes, and for just a second allows her mind to drift to a future where she can see the sky, the real actual sky, and inhale the unrecycled air and feel the sun against her skin. Her soul thrums like a tuning fork at the mere thought, waiting for the note to resolve. Waiting to see the sun.

She tries to do what Poison does. She tries to say it the way they do: with so much ferocity, such a ruthless and unrepentant bent, that the world will cave to her demands and make it so.

"I'm going to get you _all_ out of here. I promise."

**\--**

**And many other monstrous shapes of varied creatures,  
are stabled by the doors**

**\--**

The next time the Girl dies, it's to Flare, who scores a lucky shot at the back of her neck. Ordinarily her and Sprawl are _painfully_ careful not to get too reckless with the Girl, knowing full well that they're liable to suffer for it if they accidentally dispatch a high-security BL/ind asset like her. But the Girl has been needling them for months on end as she breaches their careful watch repeatedly, and Flare seems to have reached her limit.

This death feels much like the previous one. It's sudden enough that she barely feels it - a bolt of bright red heat wrapping up around her brain stem and then tumbling her forward into darkness. Then the thick stench of incense and clotted decay, and her eyes are open again.

Like before, Flare doesn't seem to have realized how close she came to losing her job, and worse. She grabs the Girl by the back of her jacket and starts to drag her for the stairs. The Girl tries to wrench out of her jacket, but Flare hooks her other arm around her neck and tries to hold her in a chokehold.

The Girl twists upwards and does the only thing she can think of to do in short notice, which is sink her teeth into the bare skin of Flare's hand. She tastes salt and copper, and Flare curses, relinquishing the Girl in shock, she thinks, more than in pain.

The Girl grins at her, the red rinsing her teeth pink, and head-butts Flare as hard as she possibly can.

She understands now, the Girl thinks to herself as she makes for the exit, her ears ringing and her head throbbing but victory still within her grasp, why it is that Better Living felt the need to shackle Kobra's face behind a metal cage.

She needs to get out of here quickly, before Better Living decides to do the same to her.

**\--**

**Centaurs and bi-formed Scylla,  
and hundred-armed Briareus, and the Lernean Hydra,  
hissing fiercely**

**\--**

She knows that most everyone in the facility pulls their punches to ensure they _don't_ wind up killing her - _ghosting_ her, as Poison would say - but if they find out that she has the Witch ensuring she doesn't _stay_ dead, that will only increase the generally unpleasant things she's forced to experience on Floor Fifty-Four. And in any case, she doesn't need to know how many times she can gamble with the Witch's attention before death stops being a cheap obstacle and more the solemn, permanent thing it is for everyone else.

Korse is more difficult to surpass than the joint efforts of Flare and Sprawl. The pair of them are easily pitted against one another with enough incentive, but Korse isn't so easily swayed. His file exposes very few of his flaws and weaknesses, though she knows he must have them. The Director has been growing increasingly unsatisfied with his performance of late, even if his marks and rankings are as high as ever. Whatever's happening with him, it must be off the record.

The Girl's not about to let it stop her, or slow her down.

Nothing so far has managed to. Not even Kobra, who has at least twice now been caught and _rehabilitated_ into facing her once more, only for her to succeed in disarming his implants each time.

The next time she reaches Korse, he's as sharp and unrelenting as ever. He nearly cuts her down again. She has to take advantage of every possible tool she has at her disposal. Even with her split-second ability to see things before they happen, Korse is too fast to anticipate.

So she blows out the lights and gets low to the ground. If she can take him off guard, then maybe she'll have a chance, just like with Flare and Sprawl.

She thinks that right up until Korse makes an unerring line for her, disables her with a shot to her leg, and begins dragging her back down below.

She double checks his file once she gets back. Sure enough, it's in there among the list of other enhancements allotted to him as one of the most successful members of the Scarecrow Unit: _electromagnetic retinal enhancement._ Full-spectrum vision, and the ability to see in the dark.

It was an error on her part. Easily overlooked.

She won't make that mistake again.

**\--**

**And the Chimaera armed with flame,  
Gorgons, and Harpies, and the triple bodied shade, Geryon.**

**\--**

"How many times you been at this now?" Poison watches the Girl devour a ration bar with ravenous urgency. She needs to make progress _fast,_ the faster the better. But she's winded and she needs to eat, so she's taking the time she needs to get ready to make this run a sprint.

"Another scarecrow in my way this time," she tells them between bites. "The best one Better Living has."

"Oh?" Poison sits up a little straighter in their cell, their gaze growing more fixed. "Anyone I know?"

"Goes by the callsign of 'Korse'," says the Girl.

Poison's spine goes rigid.

"Oh, that _bastard."_

It turns out that he's the reason they're here. All four of them, if she had to guess. Poison can't give her any pointers on how best to dispatch him. None of them can. She doesn't let that discourage her. She'll keep trying. For as long as she's able, she'll keep trying.

So far, she's failed to find any consistent means of actually unbalancing him, or even slowing him down. Every time she reaches him, he dispatches her with ruthless efficiency, his features devoid of much in the way of expression.

"You can't get rid of me," she says to him while he escorts her back to the bottom floor for the umpteenth time. "I'll just keep coming back."

He doesn't so much as look at her.

"I know," he says. The words are clear and cold and they're spoken flatly. He says it the same way that Poison says things. Like it's a fact of the universe, and all he's doing is delaying it.

**\--**

**At this, trembling suddenly with terror, Aeneas grasped  
his sword, and set the naked blade against their approach**

**\--**

Maybe it is inevitable. All things are, or are supposed to be. Death is supposed to be, but the Girl has evaded (cheated it) more times than she knows what to do with now. These are the things that course through her mind while she tries to work out the best strategy of ensuring Korse does not end this escape attempt now, when she's come this far - far enough to confirm to Poison and Jet and Ghoul that she's still trying, that she hasn't stopped or slowed down, and far enough to have freed Kobra from his electrical leash once more.

She's given up on blowing out the lights and trying to startle Korse with severed circuits. This time, she elects to pour all her focus into slowing him down as much as possible. When Korse tries to close in on her, she steps out into plain sight and opens fire with scattershot ferocity, forcing him back down behind the flipped-over table he's using for cover. The last three times she tried this, she inevitably lost what little ground she managed to gain when the battery pack chimed empty and she had to swap it out. Korse times it perfectly, every time. He knows when to swoop in and take her down.

This time, she forgoes trading battery packs entirely. She pours all her power, _all_ her ability, into keeping the charge burning in her gun for as long as possible. She's never tried this before, not exactly, but she's desperate.

Her gun issues a swelling burst of energy so hot that it nearly scalds her fingers as it cascades from the barrel in a white-hot blast. It punches a hole into the wall and forces Korse to duck. She doesn't expect the sheer _force_ of it, and stares in awe as the static charge makes every hair on her arms and the back of her neck prickle and stand on end.

Korse staggers to his feet once the shot burns and tapers off. He stares at her with the slightest deviation in his expression - a furrow in his brow that digs deeper the longer he stares at her.

"I'll keep coming back," the Girl says. She takes aim at him. His gun snaps up until it's level with hers and she'd thought she'd have more time, because he hesitated before - but when he fires she doesn't move out of the way quite quickly enough.

Her eyes snap open again as she sucks in new breath. Korse jerks backwards, his fingers curling away from her face as he stares at her with unveiled uncertainty. It's more emotion than she's ever seen him display.

"You were _dead,"_ he hisses. And - oh, no.

"No I wasn't." She scrambles back to her feet, but there's no masking the fact that the burn in the center of her chest has gone from a fatal injury to a raw itch, negligible. Korse stares at the wound like he can't quite comprehend what it is he's looking at.

"I _killed you."_ He seems to have abandoned his efforts in favor of repeating the obvious. "I was - "

"You get it now?" says the Girl, lifting her chin. She does her best to imitate the way Poison does it, proud and cocksure, even if Korse has well over a foot of height on her. She meets his gaze steadily. The roiling emotion in his answering stare might be dulled by Better Living's careful regimens, but it's there nonetheless.

Korse doesn't answer.

"I'm not going to stop," the Girl continues. "I am _never_ going to stop until I fight my way out of here. However long it takes. And I have a _very long time."_

There's every chance that she doesn't. That doesn't matter. _None_ of it is going to matter if she can make it out. Because once she makes it out, she can start planning how best to _eviscerate_ the entire place, tear it to ribbons, break every single prisoner and test subject from captivity, once and for all. Poison. Jet. Kobra. Ghoul. _All of them._

"You don't tire of it," Korse says to her at last, and there's something almost like defeat in the slope of his shoulders. "The fighting."

"Not while I have something to fight for."

She says it without hesitation.

Korse lets that sit there for a long moment. 

Then, unbelievably, impossibly - he steps to one side.

She stares at him.

"What are you doing?" Does he expect her to buy this? Sure, he just saw her _die,_ but if this isn't a _blatant_ trap, she doesn't know _what_ is.

"You have something to fight for," says Korse. "So do I. But it's not this." He gestures at the building with the tip of his gun, still smoking from the fatal shot he fired at his target. He looks, for a moment, tired. Much more tired than he should. Scarecrows are the most elite of BLi's forces. They receive every possible care so that they can fight at their peak, consistently.

But the Director has been disappointed with Korse's performance of late. For a while, actually. As long as the Girl can remember.

"If you kill me," she tells him as she advances, "I'm gonna make sure you _really_ regret it."

Korse doesn't have an answer to that other than to look away. She's not certain of it, or of anything, but she _thinks_ she can detect a flicker of guilt in the way he can no longer meet her eyes.

But he lets her go.

**\--**

**and, if his knowing companion had not warned him  
that these were tenuous bodiless lives flitting about  
with a hollow semblance of form,**

**\--**

The Director is waiting for her on the first floor.

She's backed by a phalanx of exterminators. She watches the Girl with a decisive, dispassionate air, crisp and implacable in her dark suit. Her lipstick is matte dark. Her nails are crested with coats of clear polish. She clucks her tongue disapprovingly as soon as the Girl steps into view.

"So Korse has failed me yet again," she drawls to no one in particular. "Disappointing."

It's strange hearing her without the buzz-and-static filter of an audiovisual transmission.

It's the first time the Girl has ever seen the Director of Better Living Industries in person, and not via a monitor or audio feed.

She doesn't slow her pace. She keeps walking toward her. The floor-to-ceiling glass windows on the first floor give her just a glimpse of the outside world she's fought to see for so long. All she can see are the white edges of buildings, but in particular places and gaps between the skyscrapers, there are slivers of what she's longed to see - there, a slice of clear gray sky, and the silhouette of a cloud scurrying across it. She swears she can taste the breeze on her tongue.

"That's far enough," says the Director. The line of exterminators behind her lift their weapons and train them all at the Girl, and she stops. She remembers Jet's stoicism, Kobra's locked silence, the way they could stand and feel as impenetrable as a selection of wall. She shifts her stance until she feels just the same.

She stands across from the Director with some ten yards or so between them. The Girl feels at odds with everything, out of place; the Director and her exterminators are uniform, perfect, not a hair out of place, the cut of their clothing crisp and stark and immaculate. The Girl stands with her stolen jacket bloodied and torn in places, her gun still hot and smoking in her grip, everything about her in disarray. A wire and a feather threaded into the tie keeping her hair back. A colorful marble kept hidden in the sole of her boot.

The purified air in the building is still and silent.

"You won't kill me," the Girl says at last. "You could have before now, but you never did."

"You've proven difficult to contain, it's true," the Director concedes with a mild tilt of her head. "Perhaps you will also prove difficult to kill."

The Girl laughs. The sound is a bitter exhalation, a rush of adrenaline clenching behind her sternum. She hopes there's still blood on her teeth.

"Maybe that makes me a _killjoy,"_ she says. The grin that cracks across her features feels one part Fun Ghoul and one part Party Poison, splitting up along her face in a ragged tear.

"Don't be ridiculous," the Director snaps. "You are not a killjoy. You are not even a _person,_ by all legal definitions. You are _industry property._ And it's high time that you learned your place. I will see you learning it _now."_

The Girl closes her eyes. She lets the words roll over her.

 _You have an inextinguishable fire inside you,_ whispers someone, black and oil and thick with decay.

 _You have an electric charge in your very soul,_ whispers someone else, ionizing the molecules around her.

 _You are a maelstrom ready to happen,_ whispers a third, cool and rich and laminar.

The Girl's eyes snap open.

"All right," she says. And she raises her gun. 

One of the exterminators takes a tiny step back, and the Girl smiles.

"Me first."

**\--**

**He would have rushed at them,  
and hacked at the shadows uselessly with his sword.**

**\--**

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, some references for the curious reader:
> 
> 1\. As I stated in the header notes, this entire fic was heavily inspired by the Supergiant rougelike dungeon-crawler, _Hades._ The title of this work comes from the track _Lament of Orpheus_ from said game. There is also a small reference to another one of Supergiant's games, _Pyre._
> 
> 2\. The poem between the line breaks is a bit different from my usual fare, in part because it comes from Virgil's _Aeneid_. Specifically, the quoted portions are from _Book VI,_ and two sections in particular: "Aeneas Asks Entry to Hades," and "The Entrance to Hades." These passages were chosen for...obvious reasons, I'm sure.
> 
> 3\. The number fifty-four is an intentional reference to the _Danger Days_ album, as the whole thing runs just south of fifty-four minutes, not counting the bonus tracks.


End file.
